As more scientific information about global warming accumulates, climate change is emerging as perhaps the greatest environmental challenge of the 21st century (FAO). At the global level, forest ecosystems play a major role in climate change: they remove and store carbon from the atmosphere in their biomass, soils and products; when managed sustainably, they produce wood fuel as a benign alternative to fossil fuels and offer cost-effective mitigation solutions. Over the past four decades, the use of space-borne sensor data has unique advances for the professional community to estimate forest ecosystems. Remote sensing techniques have become an unprecedented alternative to expensive and time consuming field measures in monitoring of forest ecosystems over large and remote geographic areas. While important progress has been made in the field, an integrated understanding of the resilience and vulnerability of forest ecosystems at the regional and global scales remains critical. The conference is aimed at promoting the exchange of new research ideas and practices on the use of remote sensing in the estimation of forest ecosystems and tackling the issues of climate change.

Since 2010, “Forest ecosystems in the conditions of climate change: biological productivity and remote sensing” (FORECOS) has become an annual international conference on the application of remote sensing technologies for monitoring and assessment of forest ecosystems. The conferences have been supported by theNASA-LCLUC programme, EU Tempus, EU Erasmus+, IUFRO (International Union of Forestry Research Organizations), and EFI (European Forest Institute). The Conference is organized by the staff of the Centre of Sustainable Forest Management and Remote Sensing of the Volgatech (Yoshkar-Ola, Russia).